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Dennis the Menace, 2/25/17

My one and only encounter with childhood religious instruction that I can remember came when I was maybe in the six to eight years old range; we were visiting my mom’s parents in Ohio, and I sat in a Sunday school class at their church. The teacher acted out the story of Jonah and the whale by putting a Playmobil man into a giant plastic toy shark, and as a know-it-all child this bothered me a lot, because I was very smug in the knowledge that sharks were fish and whale were mammals. But I didn’t say anything, which is just as well, since the bible actually uses the word “fish” (and the ancient Hebrews really didn’t make the distinction anyway); and besides, I wasn’t the type of kid to make a fuss in front of strangers, or to challenge authority. I guess you could say I wasn’t … a menace?

Anyway, while I suspect that modern-day Sunday Schools (especially those run by namby-pamby Episcopalians) don’t follow the injunction from Proverbs that “he that spareth his rod hateth his son,” I also have a hard time imagining that they just turn the other cheek when it comes to classroom disruptions that would get you a stern talking-to and note sent home at a Godless public school. Thus, the only way to interpret this panel that makes sense is that, here in Sunday School, Dennis doesn’t want to act out or cause a fuss, which is probably the least menacing attitude he could possibly take.

Mary Worth, 2/25/17

Speaking of Jesus, what’s Tommy been up to while Iris sows her wild oats all over campus? Thinking about big bottles of delicious pills, mostly! I dearly hope that when a tear-soaked Iris returns to her apartment from Mary’s advice session, we see her from Tommy’s perspective, and it’s like when a hungry wolf in an old cartoon sees someone’s head turn into a rotisserie chicken, except Iris’s head looks like a bottle of Vicodin, or maybe just one enormous Vicodin tablet.

Mark Trail, 2/25/17

OH MY GOD

MARK TRAIL IS A VAMPIRE

OR MAYBE DOC OR CHERRY

OR RUSTY

YES, RUSTY IS THE ONE MOST LIKELY TO BE AN UNDEAD BLOOD-SUCKING GHOUL

STILL, EITHER WAY: AHHHHHHHHHHHHHH

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Gil Thorp, 2/24/17

Today’s Gil Thorp doesn’t necessarily offer a thematically unified big laugh, but is full of little hilarious details that come together to show why I love this strip so much:

• The Freezy Bomb Boys couldn’t wait to shower or change after practice before bursting into Coach Thorp’s office with their latest half-baked theory
• Coach Thorp apparently thinks Inspector Gadget is a good go-to insulting reference when it comes to amateur detective work, even when said detectives are not, in the poetic words of the Wikipedia article on the subject, “clumsy, dim-witted cyborgs”
• Coach Thorp has misremembered Inspector Gadget’s name, and thus may have forgotten much else about him, like the fact that he’s a cyborg, and has to be smugly corrected by Coach Kaz
• Coach Kaz is wearing a black shirt and white tie like he’s the keyboardist for a middlingly derivative 80s new wave band
• This whole thing hinges on Aaron’s basketball ability being tied to … his mother’s pay schedule, maybe?
• Final planel: BAM, a classic Gil Thorp smash cut to something semi-comprehensible happening somewhere else, in this case Aaron and Molly nuzzling at a rave, where NOTHING ELSE MATTERS

Anyway! I very much look forward to this all being resolved in a wholly unrealistic fashion soon, and then the Mudlarks subsequently failing to make the playdowns.

Funky Winkerbean, 2/24/17

Do you guys think that the cop in panel two is meant to be expressing genuine love for Montoni’s, or that he’s just being extremely sarcastic as he writes Funky a ticket he definitely deserves? It’s hard to tell with this strip. I mean, either would be good, because both involve Funky being humiliated, but I feel like I want to better understand the texture of the schadenfreude I’m experiencing here.

Judge Parker, 2/24/17

Shoutout to this Judge Parker flashback for doing a pretty good job of depicting Abbey and Neddy in the Harold LeDoux era. I find the third panel pretty puzzling, though. The kids have already been let go! How are the kidnappers going to do anything with them? Unless … I was right, and “Sophie” really is a replicant replacement? As are the other supposedly free children? And this is the first step towards replacing the entire universe of Judge Parker with a better, cleaner race of beings, i.e., cyborgs? That still doesn’t seem like much of a money-making scheme, to be honest.

Mark Trail, 2/24/17

I’m not sure how often customs agents in foreign countries ask Americans travelling to America what their purpose for traveling to America is, but it sure gives Chris “Dirty” “Smith” a chance to answer in a Transparently Evil fashion! It’s not going to be very “sporting” when Mark punches Dirty’s eyepatch right off, but he’s going to have to learn the limits of his hunting abilities himself, I guess.

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Pluggers, 2/23/17

I’ve been doing this job (if making fun of Pluggers is a job, and I would argue that it is, and an important one at that) for more than a decade, which is enough time to see broad swaths of the culture change. Still, with a comic like Pluggers, which is focused largely on down-home country folks who suspect that maybe things used to be better than they are today, you expect a certain amount of small-c conservatism. You expect stability. You expect that it’ll be more or less the same, in almost a comforting way. You don’t expect it to be about tits, and you don’t expect the joke to basically be a slightly updated version of this classic Playtex ad from 1982. You don’t expect that you’ll spend time staring at a Pluggers panel thinking “Did the artist pick entry this because he was excited to draw a ‘plugger gal’ exemplifying the ‘lift and separate’ catchphrase, or did he run out of usable suggestions and decide, ‘Welp, it’s come to this’”? You don’t expect a lot of things in this life, but if you live long enough, you end up encountering almost all of them.

Mark Trail, 2/23/17

Ahahah, ladies, always whining about how they can’t find a man, but when a perfectly good one with terrible facial scarring and a dumb self-applied nickname that he makes everyone use walks right into them at the airport, somehow they can’t seal the deal, because they talk too much about themselves or whatever! Probably this is feminism’s fault. If you’re serious about getting married and having kids before your biological clock stops ticking, you need to check out my new self-help book, Play Dirty: How To Turn Your Back On Misguided Gender ‘Equality’ And Snag A One-Eyed Man Who Will Pull You Into His Violent Revenge Plot.

Rex Morgan, M.D., 2/23/17

God damn it, Horrible Hank in Rex Morgan isn’t dead after all. We now return you to thrilling tales of dehydration and old-man naps, already in interminable progress.